So much QQ, you'll need a flotation device.

And Then the Power Went Out

So the power went out Tuesday night. KABLOOEY and right in the middle of playing Dragon Age, too. But who will save Ferelden naow?!??!/1

There was a pretty huge snowstorm here on Tuesday. The wt, clumpy kind of snow, the kind perfectly suited to making snowmen and utterly destroying power lines.

It is now friday, and the repair dudes are estimating it will take another ten days or so before they get power restored. I mean, holy shit, ten days? I mean I knew living a couple minutes drive out of the city had its risks, but… damn, ten days?

Anyway, I’m shacked up with a friend now. Believe it or not I actually do have a couple of those. And I have internet access again! Woo! This is perhaps the most important thing, though I still lack a proper desktop. I’ve been forced to abandon it for now. Sadness!

So lets see if I can summarize a week’s worth of stuff into a single post.

HUNTERS

The hunter focus mechanic has me worried. I have an 80 hunter at which I am reasonably competent, and am extremely fond of marksman. I’ve found BM extremely boring since the death of steady shot weaving, and Survival is quite possibly the worst play style I have ever tried.

Imagine you have six buttons. Now imagine each of those buttons fire an ability that has a cooldown ranging from six seconds to thirty seconds. Now imagine that you are blindfolded and have no idea which button is which. Now imagine that you can’t use your fingers, only smash your fist into the keyboard, and all six buttons are in the exact same location.

That’s what survival feels like. In conclusion, I don’t know why I like marksman. Two buttons and then spam steady shot; I don’t even have to refresh serpent sting. On paper it should be just as boring, but it isn’t! I do not know why.

Anyway, focus. Primarily what concerns me is the focus cost on offensive and defensive cooldowns. Mostly the defensive ones, cause really, what if you don’t have enough focus? Well, you’re dead. This is equally alarming for both raiding and PvP, and really the only way I can see focus working for hunters without being a ball crushing nerf is if all cooldowns didn’t cost anything or steady shot was instant cast/usable whilst moving.

Either that or there are some very serious talent tweaks in store so this doesn’t completely screw hunters.

DEATH KNIGHTS

With the consolidation as the blood tree being for tanking, and frost and unholy being for DPS, 2H frost is coming back with cataclysm! Woo! I’ll finally be able to play the only DK playstyle I actually liked again.

I suppose this and the hunter thing solidifies my idea that homogenization fears are unfounded. Three hunter specs that use basically the exact same button, yet I hate and refuse to play two of them? A Death Knight spec where literally the only change is that it goes from swinging around a 2hander to dual wielding, and yet I cannot play the new way for longer than a few minutes without becoming frustrated and bored?

PRIESTS

Chakras seems like a cool idea with bad execution. Casting three AoE heals before you’re even any good at casting AoE heals? I suppose we need the specifics, but it seems to me that if you’re even in a situation where you need to cast five or six AoE heals in a row, something has probably gone horribly and irrevocably wrong.

PALADINS

Dear Blizzard,

Don’t screw this up again. I would like to play a ret paladin and not feel like an underpowered gimp once in a while.

“Weaknesses are supposed to be something you keep in mind while you’re playing. I’m sure Ret paladins would love Heroic Leap… but that plugs a hole really, really well where you risk being a one person army”

This concerns me quite a bit. A lack of mobility is hugely crippling to ret paladins, and losing cleanse is only going to severely exacerbate that. But apparently ret gets an interrupt, finally.

On the other hand, I do like the idea they have going where paladins, both prot and ret, push different buttons, or at least have differing rotations, when fighting single versus multiple targets. On live, using things like Divine Storm and Consecration aren’t really decisions. Whether you’re fighting one guy, two guys or seventeen guys the priority is pretty much the same.

Giving divine storm the whirlwind treatment (that is, half damage that hits unlimited targets) makes it extremely good for AoE but very poor for single target DPS. Having a priority system like, say:

… and then have something like “Art of War now allows Holy Wrath to damage all enemies, but removes the stun effect” or something, that would be cool. Having to seriously switch up priorities between single and multi-targets would be wonderful for a little bit of depth, and I suspect prot paladins might feel the same way?

I’d also love having to switch seals mid-combat too, as the situation calls for it.

PURCHASABLE FLYING MOUNTS

Slippery slope argument. Argument that nobody likes to play games where the rich kids have huge advantages over their fellows except the rich kids. Now, repeat these two arguments over and over again to simulate the debate.

I won’t be buying the flying mount. I like mounts that look… I dunno how to describe it. More of the simple, practical variety of mounts. The engineering flying mount is about the flashiest mount I’ll ever ride. Things like War Raptors and Black Drakes are right up my alley. You can keep the damn My Little Flying Pony.

Q: How will haste affect channeled spells. Will it be similar to DoTs and HoTs?
A: They will channel faster but their duration will remain unchanged. You will get more ticks on the same cast.

So high haste mages will get more ticks from arcane missiles and more ticks from evocate? A Blizzard spell that simply adds ticks as it rains down? I quite like this idea, actually.

It would seem we’re going to have to start thinking about haste like elemental shamans do.

Look at it this way. Blizzard takes 8 seconds to channel with one tick per second. Lets say 100 haste reduces that channel time to 7.5 seconds, but under the new system it would still be 8 seconds. However, with .5 seconds worth of haste, that means half a tick will be added to Blizzard.

But, there is no such thing as half ticks. So that 100 haste will be completely useless to the Blizzard spell. But, go up to 200 haste, you get an extra tick, and now suddenly haste is a fantastic stat. And so, continue this trend ad infinitum. 300 haste? Useless. 400? Awesome sauce.

What we’ll see is that the weighting of haste as a good stat increasing and decreasing depending on the value of haste you have, independent of your other stats. Obviously the value of haste will vary depending on your other stats, but it will change independently as well.

Going back to my Blizzard example, improving your haste from 201 to 399 would be far less valuable than increasing it from 399 to 400.

Q: Can you make crowd control in raids and 5-mans an important aspect of the PvE game again?
A: An emphatic yes.

Ditto.

WALL OF FOG

PvP mages wet themselves in glee. PvE mages almost fell asleep.

Dear PvE mages: you’d best figure out where to bind your Wall of Fog spell, I can absolutely guarantee you that you are going to want that button easily accessible for multiple fights in cataclysm.

DRUIDS

“Restoration druids are actually getting a fair bit… Tree of Life is getting a whole new model (think Ancients of War)”

Isn’t this exactly what every single druid blogger in the world was saying Blizzard should do if they killed the perma-tree form?

Q. What change are you most excited about?
A. Some of the new Balance talents for druids, like Solar Beam, which works like Freya’s spell where it instantly silences a target and they have to move out of the beam to get rid of the debuff.

When was the last time moonkin were viable in PvP? Oh that’s right, that was never. Nice to see some adjustments actually pushing them towards that, and moonking + frost mage = win when shutting down healers methinks.

Has anyone used the term moonking before? Maybe we should start. Go moonkings go!

I don’t wanna have to fight moonkins and have it be hard! I wanna three-shot them like I do now! Moonkins are the only Druids I can quickly, easily, reliably kill!

Still, Blizz has always been creative with boss mechanics, and seeing these given to players is sure to make the game more interesting. Wild speculation is a great deal of fun here. I want to see warlocks with Illidan-eyebeams. Or mages with Gravity Lapse. Can you imagine that!?!?

So if Evocate got more ticks … that could be kinda cool. Stack an Arcmage with eighty billion haste and get 120% mana return. I could go for that.

When you consider that Arcane’s getting mastery Haste and Bloodlust too, that sort of thing is totally possible. And it’d fit great into the final tier mastery bonus.

So Arcane’s damage over time curve has a nice, regular spikyness based on Evocate cooldowns. The best mages, of course, get this to synch up with the expected length of the fight.

I’m actually really liking how all this is shaping up.

My bet is that Blizz is going to do something to make half-ticks useful somehow, if only to avoid the situation you described—infinite tiers of this-much-bonus-haste-is-useless,-but-this-much-plus-one-is-a-10%-increase-to-dps. Perhaps make spells tick more often, or add a remainder-tick to the end that does, say, half damage if you have only half as much haste as you’d need for a full tick. Or something.

Oh, and shiny star ponies for real money? If that mount dropped off Algalon, I’d definitely try to get it, and I’d be tremendously jealous of anyone flying around Dalaran on their pretty winged horsie. Like Invincible and all. But as it is? Thoroughly meh.

With the haste and channeled spells thing, wouldn’t adding 0.5 seconds worth of haste allow you to cast your next spell sooner, due to the ticks occurring quicker the last tick would still be sooner than a channel with no haste. Not sure if that’s the way blizz will implement this but it’s the logical assumption (I think, I might be missing something obvious).

If haste affects channeled spells as I’ve suggested that will just create more chances for skilled players to exceed lesser players. Blizz have stated that the channel time remains unchanged regardless of haste but if the ticks occur at shorter intervals the last tick will be earlier than the full channel time so a watchful player could queue their next spell before the end of the channel while taking advantage of every tick.

1. People are too stupid to CC, kite, spread out, or run away from them. People who are smart enough to do these things are frequently hampered by those who don’t understand that sheep breaks on damage.
2. Survival cooldowns/trinkets tend to be blown more often in BG’s (as it’s not always a fair fight), so the chance of a Ret catching you with your escapes down is more likely.
3. A ret who bubbles with 10% health in an arena is little more than an annoyance. You switch to his friends and kill them off, and his options are: a) do ineffectual dps, or b) do ineffectual healing, or c) heal himself and then die because now it’s 2v1. A ret who bubbles with 10% health in a BG just bought his team 12 more seconds to rez, just delayed the flag cap by 12 more seconds, just got 12 more seconds of beating on that almost-dead artillery gun or Demolisher.
4. You can LoH in a BG.

In arena? Rets have a very poor showing. They have only two interrupts on minute-long cooldowns (Belfs get another, which makes them the only semi-viable Retadin race ever), no mortal strike effect, and their major offensive cooldowns blackout their major defensive cooldowns and vice versa—i.e. they have no way to pressure healers effectively. Their only CC break, aside from trinket, is their bubble (i.e. major survival cooldown) or Hand of Freedom-ing stuns, which is their key to not being kited the whole game.

Yes, they have crazy awesome short-ranged burst and can be very hard to kill when played defensively, but that’s about where their advantages stop. They are supremely easy to kite, chain CC on, and disable.

The $25 mount is everywhere you look. I think it should have been implemented in the Cataclysm expansion. Players over 80 with a 310% mount can fork out x amount of gold to purchase the mount. People are trading the $25 mount for gold in game. Is this Blizzard’s new strategy to combat gold selling? To run them out of business? Can Blizzard be more subtle and disguise their focus towards making the most $$$ out of lucrative WoW?

I am happy to pay $25 if it meant no more bots in BGs. Nothing in WoW bothers me as much as bots, the farming bots, the levelling bots, and the worst is BG bots.

On the matter of ret pallies. I find them the easiest to beat. They are the only healing class I can beat no problem.

Not sure about other mage players but as a fire mage, I find in the order of easiest to beat to hardest:
Paladin, ret easiest, holy and then prot.
Warrior, prot hardest but even so not hard.
Hunters, yeh /hug hunters literally.
Moonkin, they better wish their mushroom is powerful.
Rogues, especially with resilience no problem with rogues.
DK, Too much anti-magic stuff and silences make them a challenge to beat.
Druids, cats…geez they are crazy these days. The bear is not so tough but usually they are cats in disguise!
Warlocks, depending on their skill, warlocks are the scissors to mage’s paper. Thanks for nerfing wotf :(
Priests, hate shadow because it’s tough being dotted to death whilst silenced the whole time.
TREE!!! They do not need more buffs in any way…for goodness sakes. Are you seeing them in BGs? Are you seeing them in arena? 1 on 1 they are a caster’s nightmare.

Shamans…hehe they are after moonkin. Another healing class that my fire mage can handle, not as easily as holy pallies though.

It’s funny with paladins. laughable for all that time. Then for a period they were ludicrously overpowered. To the point of slaughtering armies of people with one move. And now…back to underpowered but at least not in a humiliating way. What’s in store for them cataclysm?

My wild guess for channeling spells would be something in the likes of the “non-clipping” DoTs: You can restart a channel, or reapply the DoT, early whithout loosing dps for it. However if you switch spells the extra haste will simply be lost (if you can’t time the new spell with the last effective tick).

GC just gave the answer: Reducing time until the next tick comes and then timer goes back to the regular duration. Simple solution, I guess. We ( Shadowpriests, Hi Merlot!!!) will still have those strangely timed DoTs but at least nothing as extreme a today.

re: My bet is that Blizz is going to do something to make half-ticks useful somehow, if only to avoid the situation you described—infinite tiers of this-much-bonus-haste-is-useless,-but-this-much-plus-one-is-a-10%-increase-to-dps.

I’m not so sure about this. I mean, rightly or wrongly, the first thing that came to mind was “hit” for a hunter. Need 8% and everything scales down to the nearest integer. 7.99%? Tough crap, that equals 7% (which transfers to hunter pet). And, remember, back in the day when BM hunter was king, a pet providing 40-50% of your DpS which missed an extra 1% of the time resulted in gobs of missed DpS. Perhaps, like hunters (via focused aim), mages will get talents that allow you to increase your haste by a quantitative amount (10%, 20%, 30%). Of course, you could also gem haste to get to the next level (200, 400, 600, etc.). Perhaps then we can all (hunters and mages alike) share in the glee of having to totally re-talent and re-gem every time we get a new piece of gear which screws up our hit, err, haste rating.